Sunday, January 20, 2008

What We're Listening To: Jimmie Dale Gilmore's Texas Twang

Continuing our turn to entertainment (see previous post), we want to say a few kind words about a Texas singer/songwriter of rare talent: Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

We don't know much about the guy, but his voice is a "high lonesome" wonder, somehow achingly brittle but smoothed over with a kind of liquid hollowness.

We've never seen Gilmore in person, but we were driving in Austin once when his version of Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry came over the airwaves. Gilmore's voice is so well suited to that song that we almost crashed the car—and we've never forgotten the song.

You can find that tune and several other oldies-but-goodies on Gilmore's 1993 CD, Spinning Around the Sun. It's a solid rockabilly album, holding up well in the new century.

Keep singing, Jimmie. Listening to you, even us Okies could get homesick for Texas.

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